Don't blame the press release. A surprisingly large number of important news stories start that way, not least every blue-chip company's financial results or the confirmation of a senior appointment at any public or private body. Formal, public announcements have to be made somehow, and interpreted thereafter.

Don't blame journalists, either. What you'll find on the news pages is mostly a crafted, collected summary of what happened yesterday, or a prediction about today, produced against a tight deadline. Occasionally an investigation that exposes something nobody knew before, such as a government leak or a kiss-and-tell, leavens the mix.

So what churnalism.com should mostly expose is the journalism of the margins: the news items that might once have just made the in-brief columns, lifted and unchecked from a press release or from another news source. Except now, that sort of instant, "filler'' journalism has drifted a little closer to the mainstream.

News websites hungry for content will happily send reporters to write up any sort of press release in pursuit of traffic. Such content has so little value that the journalists producing it are often under pressure to turn out repeated items – and in an environment where there is little time and little flair, copying and pasting is the starting point for writing.

This is not the journalism of the Libyan revolution, the WikiLeaks cables, or the New Zealand earthquake, but it is a market for news that the public relations industry has spotted. This is the terrain of the unnecessary "sponsored" survey, where "brunettes make the best wives" according to a survey of men on behalf of Philips sensual massagers, and where Asda kindly concludes that "families are £13 a week worse off".

Churnalism.com will clearly help expose some laziness in the media. The accompanying film shows it may be possible to make up a story about a "penazzle",the male answer to the crystal decorations offered by a vajazzle, and get it covered by an enthusiastic newspaper or two.

However, that doesn't mean that all journalism amounts to some sort of fraud. Though, in the case of the penazzle, it is rather hard to conclude that anybody has been harmed. And, come to think of it, if it was so easy to push the idea of male genital decoration into a newspaper, penazzles may in fact be a business idea waiting to happen.